About me
Does chance even exist? Who knows. Personally, I don't think it does: looking back at my life, I keep seeing situations where I was nudged toward a certain outcome from every direction — there was no other way to go.
Years ago, on a Czech discussion forum called Nyx (one of the granddads of Facebook and sites like it), I used to roll dice every day. I started the thread myself, prepared 127 possible predictions, and rolled — a random generator picked 3 of them each time. Thanks to those dice, I even met a boyfriend: we both rolled that we should go to the pub that evening, and it turned out we lived about 300 meters apart, back then in Prague. We stayed together for three years.
So really — why not sometimes let "chance" decide, when, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't even exist? :)
A little history of the fortune cookie
Here's a fun surprise: the fortune cookie isn't actually Chinese. Its roots trace back to Japan, to a small cracker called tsujiura senbei — a "fortune cracker" sold near temples and shrines close to Kyoto as far back as the 1870s, folded around a little slip of paper instead of a hollow center.
Japanese immigrants brought the tradition to California in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One of the earliest known servings in the US came from Makoto Hagiwara at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, with the cookies baked by a local bakery called Benkyodo. Around the same time, other Japanese-American bakers in Los Angeles — including Seiichi Kito of Fugetsu-Do and David Jung of the Hong Kong Noodle Company — also claimed to have invented it. The dispute even went before San Francisco's Court of Historical Review in 1983, which ruled in the city's favor.
So how did a Japanese treat end up as the classic ending to a Chinese meal? During World War II, Japanese-American bakers were forced into internment camps, and Chinese-American manufacturers stepped in to keep making the cookies — which is how fortune cookies became linked with Chinese restaurants in the decades that followed, even though you'll rarely find them in China itself.
Today, billions of fortune cookies are made every year — almost all of them in the United States. And now, with a tap instead of a crack, you can open one anytime, anywhere. 🥠
Suggest a fortune
Have an idea for a fortune, a piece of wisdom, or a fun little command? Send it in — I read every suggestion.